Personal writing, exploring our own lives. What is personal writing? ; The joy of reading and writing: Superman and me / Sherman Alexie ; A question of class / Dorothy Allison ; "What's your name, girl?" / Maya Angelou ; Notes of a native son / James Baldwin ; My father's life / Raymond Carver ; Silent dancing / Judith Ortiz Cofer ; A clack of tiny sparks: remembrances of a gay boyhood / Bernard Cooper ; Learning to read and write / Frederick Douglass ; The land of no: love in a class-riven America / Andre Dubus III ; Under water / Anne Fadiman ; In the kitchen / Henry Louis Gates Jr. ; from Hiroshima diary / Michihicko Hachiya ; Blank slate / Silas Hansen ; On stuttering / Edward Hoagland ; Salvation / Langston Hughes ; Arrival / Ha Jin ; The estrangement/ Jamaica Kincaid ; If you are what you eat, then what am I? / Geeta Kothari ; My two lives / Jhumpa Lahiri ; On being a cripple / Nancy Mairs ; The rake: a few scenes from my childhood / David Mamet ; Home at last / Dinaw Mengestu ; Leave your name at the border / Manuel Muñoz ; Shooting an elephant / George Orwell ; A yard of cloth / Annie Proulx ; Aria: a memoir of a bilingual childhood / Richard Rodriguez ; My speech at West Point / Marjane Satrapi ; Me talk pretty one day / David Sedaris ; Sticky fingers / Patti Smith ; Just walk on by: a black man ponders his power to alter public space / Brent Staples ; Into the woods ; Cheryl Strayed ; Beauty: when the other dancer is the self / Alice Walker ; Scattered inconveniences / Jerald Walker ; Once more to the lake / E. B. White ; Eight simple, short words / Elie Wiesel

Expository writing, shaping information. What is expository writing? ; A few too many / Joan Acocella ; What meets the eye / Daniel Akst ; The ugly truth about beauty / Dave Barry ; Analyze, don't summarize / Michael Bérubé ; Our wall / Charles Bowden ; People like us / David Brooks ; The insufficiency of honesty / Stephen L. Carter ; Why women smile / Amy Cunningham ; The Santa Ana / Joan Didion ; This is the life / Annie Dillard ; A writing portfolio / Brian Doyle ; On dumpster diving / Lars Eighner ; A farewell to yarns / Ian Frazier ; What you don't know makes you nervous / Daniel Gilbert ; Small change: why the revolutions will not be tweeted / Malcolm Gladwell ; My visit to Niagara / Nathaniel Hawthorne ; The terminal check / Pico Iyer ; Everything you need to know about writing successfully...in ten minutes / Stephen King ; Our place in the universe / Alan Lightman ; Gettysburg Address / Abraham Lincoln ; Hip-hop planet / James McBride ; The way to Rainy Mountain / N. Scott Momaday ; from Reading Lolita in Tehran / Azar Nafisi ; SAT / Danielle Ofri ; Politics and the English language / George Orwell ; The end of cooking? / Michael Pollan ; Why boys don't play with dolls / Katha Pollitt ; Why McDonald's fries taste so good / Eric Schlosser ; The life of images / Charles Simic ; The new greatest generation / Joel Stein ; The death of a moth / Virginia Woolf

Argumentative writing, contending with issues. What is argumentative writing? ; Is Google making us stupid? / Nicholas Carr ; Will women still need men? / Barbara Ehrenreich ; Let them eat dog / Jonathan Safran Foer ; Against school / John Taylor Gatto ; Believe me, it's torture / Christopher Hitchens ; The Declaration of Independence / Thomas Jefferson ; I have a dream / Martin Luther King Jr. ; Letter from Birmingham Jail / Martin Luther King Jr. ; Against love / Laura Kipnis ; A moral atmosphere / Bill McKibben ; The trouble with diversity / Walter Benn Michaels ; Get happy / Walter Mosley ; Grant Park victory speech / Barack Obama ; The pitfalls of plastic surgery / Camille Paglia ; Violence vanquished / Steven Pinker ; Ed and Mary do Mars and Venus / Mary Roach ; What isn't for sale? / Michael J. Sandel ; The tyranny of choice / Barry Schwartz ; In the combat zone / Leslie Marmon Silko ; The Singer solution to world poverty / Peter Singer ; The trouble with self-esteem / Lauren Slater ; A modest proposal / Jonathan Swift ; Consider the lobster / David Foster Wallace ; Fatheralong / John Edgar Wideman ; Stories Hollywood never tells / Howard Zinn

The short story, six modern classics. What are short stories? ; This is what it means to say Phoenix, Arizona / Sherman Alexie ; Girl / Jamaica Kincaid ' Interpreter of maladies / Jhumpa Lahiri ' Where are you going, where have you been? / Joyce Carol Oates ; A good man is hard to find / Flannery O'Connor ; A&P / John Updike.